Contributors Fall 2017


Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s (Asha in Allston) work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, The Awl, Michigan Quarterly Review, Redux, Compose, Nimrod, Asian American Literary Review, Notre Dame Review, jellyfish review, aaduna, Bangalore Review and elsewhere. She received a Henfield Transatlantic Writing award, scholarships to Grub Street and Squaw Valley Writers conferences, and is at work on a novel.


Virginia Chase Sutton‘s (Science and Survival) chapbook, Down River, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Her third book, Of a Transient Nature, was published last year by Knut House Press and her second book, What Brings You to Del Amo, won the Morse Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Amethyst Arsenic, among many other literary magazines, journals, and anthologies. She lives in Tempe, Arizona, with her husband.


Jane Cornish Smith (Illustrator) received B.F.A. and M.L.A. degrees from Southern Methodist University, and an M.F.A. from Texas A&M University-Commerce. She has completed artist residencies at the International School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture in Italy, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She enjoys teaching studio art classes and workshops in Dallas and surrounding areas.


Leah Jane Esau (A Mother) is an award-winning playwright and fiction writer. Her fiction has appeared in PANK, Bodega Magazine, Monkeybicycle, The New Quarterly, Grain, The Dalhousie Review and upcoming in the South Dakota Review. Her short story “Dream Interpretation” was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust of Canada’s Bronwen Wallace Award.


David Jauss (The Bridge) is the author of four collections of short stories (Crimes of Passion, Black Maps, Glossolalia: New & Selected Stories, and Nice People: New & Selected Stories II), two collections of poems (Improvising Rivers and You Are Not Here), and a collection of essays (On Writing Fiction). He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a James A. Michener / Copernicus Society of America Fellowship, and three fellowships from the Arkansas Arts Council. He teaches in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.


Lucinda Kempe‘s (Gut) work has been published in Jellyfish Review, Summerset Review, Matter Press’s Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, decomP, and Corium. She won the Joseph Kelly Prize for Creative Writing in 2015 and is an M.F.A. candidate in writing and creative literature at Stony Brook University.


Rebecca Khera (Circles) graduated from Florida State University in 2014 with a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Writing. When not working, reading, or writing, she watches every season of Survivor, scours the internet for cheap flights abroad, and invents new popsicle flavors. This is her first published essay.


Izzy López  (Calling Out) is originally from Boston, Massachusetts and is currently a creative writing student at the University of Pennsylvania. This is her first publication.


Nancy Ludmerer‘s (Yard Sale) fiction and essays have appeared in Kenyon Review, Hospital Drive, Litro, Amsterdam Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, Cimarron Review, and Literal Latte, among other fine journals. Her flash fiction has been published in Vestal Review, North American Review, KYSO Flash, Grain, Night Train, and Blue Monday Review and her flash “First Night” (a prizewinner in River Styx) also appeared in Best Small Fictions 2016. She lives in New York City with her husband Malcolm and their cat Sandy, a brave survivor of Superstorm Sandy.


David Marchino (Going Places) is a Philadelphia-based creative nonfiction writer, whose work has appeared in The Penn Review. His essay “No Goodbyes” won the 2016 Penn PubCo Award for Best First-Person Narrative, and his short manuscript He Will Be Remembered earned him honors from the University of Pennsylvania’s Creative Writing Program. In the mornings, he jogs at the rising sun—without sunglasses—squinting hard through the light. He is reading. He is writing. He is searching.


Meaghann Quinn (Teenager’s Cache) is an Assistant Poetry Editor for The Tishman Review. She holds an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College. She was nominated for Best New Poets 2015, a 2015 Pushcart Prize, and was a recipient of the Nancy Penn Holsenbeck Prize. Her poems are forthcoming or have been published in A Portrait in Blues: An Anthology, Off the Coast, Heartwood, 2River, Adrienne, Triggerfish, Free State Review, and other journals.


Ron Riekki (Sonnet 0) wrote U.P.: a novel (Sewanee Writers Series and Great Michigan Read nominated) and edited The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book from the Library of Michigan and finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award/Grand Prize shortlist, Midwest Book Award, Foreword Book of the Year, and Next Generation Indie Book Award), Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (2016 IPPY/Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal Great Lakes—Best Regional Fiction and Next Generation Indie Book Award—Short Story finalist), and And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017 (Michigan State University Press, 2017).


Laura Madeline Wiseman (Pigeons) teaches writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is the editor of two anthologies, Bared and Women Write Resistance, selected for the Nebraska 150 Sesquicentennial Book List. She is the recipient of 2015 Honor Book Nebraska Book Award, Wurlitzer Foundation Fellowship, and an Academy of American Poets Award. Her book Drink won the 2016 Independent Publisher Bronze Book Award for poetry. Her latest book is Velocipede (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), a 2016 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award Finalist for Sports.